OLD – M1 research internship, evaluation

[ this translation of the french version of this page is based on work by Raphaël Monat: merci beaucoup! ]

Get quickly in touch with D. Hirschkoff (or your tutor) if you have difficulties during your intenship.

A general remark: you should not suppose that people reading your report/attending your presentation are specialists of the field you worked on during your internship. This should not prevent you from providing technical details, but the latter should be explained. Do not focus on the technical material only. Experience shows that M1 students tend to give too much emphasis on the technique, as if they were talking to their internship supervisor.

1 Report

Format:

20 pages at most. If needed, you include an online appendix, containing proofs, numerical results, an article you wrote with your supervisor, some code…

It is highly recommended that your supervisor proofreads your report (this means that you need to finish writing your draft early, to have time for proofreading and corrections).

Concerning the content:

Introduce the domain

You need to explain the question you have studied, and the context/reasons of your study.
– Where does the problem you studied come from?
– Why is this question interesting/relevant?
– What was the state-of-the-art at the beginning of your internship?
– Be aware that you need to present relevent related work.

Present your work

– If you have 10 results, you will not have the space to present everything (or it will be compressed and really difficult to understand). You need to select what you will present.
– If you don’t have any result, you can write about what you tried and why it failed, and how the difficulties were handled, together with your supervisor, along the internship.

Comment on your approach

It is also interesting to know how your research went:

– What did not work?

– Your interactions with your supervisor

– Your collaborations with other members of the lab

– The initiatives you have taken
This shouldn’t be a signficant part of your report/presentation, but it will help in assessing the quality of your work.

Experimental results (if applicable)

If you have developped non-trivial programs or used some tools, mention them!

– Size of the code
– Tools/languages used
– Expected use of the tool(s)
– Implementation choices

2 Presentation

Format: 20 minutes of presentation, 5 minutes of questions.

Rehearse your presentations at least twice! You will be interrupted if you exceed the given presentation time.

Your presentation will be a disaster if you’re interrupted during part 2 / 5 of your presentation. Conversely, if you finish your presentation in 8 minutes, it will also be a disaster.

Put pressure on yourself! Preparing a nice and crystal-clear presentation is a really difficult exercise, needing a lot of preparation.

– You should avoid mentionning too many technical details, you will loose your audience this way. But you need to strike a balance and still mention technical points.

– (Similar to the report) You need to present the question you worked on, and your contributions. Non specialists (i.e, other researchers from the LIP, or other students) should be able to follow your presentation.

Have a backup of your presentation on a USB stick, in case of technical problems between your computer and the projector.
– You need to have a machine to project your slides. You can share a computer for all presentations of a given session. It is highly recommended to test your projection skills before the presentation day.
– If you are using Beamer, `pdfpc’ is an interesting tool to project your slides
– Use git to version your documents/work. This should prevent ay loss of your work.